Putin: U.S. Routinely Meddles in Russian and Other Nations’ Elections

In a Showtime interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American film-maker Oliver Stone, which started airing on June 12th, Putin called “lies” many of the allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies, to the effect that he or his government attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He also accused the U.S. government of having actually done not only that (influencing other countries’ democratic process), but far more actual meddling in Russian elections, and in the elections in other former Soviet-and-allied countries, and even done it in recent times, and even done it to countries that had never been friendly toward Russia. The way he asserted this accusation was veiled, however, so that he didn’t identify the specific governments he was referring to, other than to say: “In 2000, and in 2012, this always happened. But especially aggressively in 2012. I will not go into details.” (This article will supply some of those “details,” in what follows.)

Putin described the current accusations against Russia, by the U.S. government, as a deceitful and fictitious tat, which ignores the very real and longstanding American tit, of CIA and other U.S., meddling in the electoral processes of foreign countries.

The neoconservative American Jan Wenner’s Rolling Stone magazine headlined on June 16th about these Showtime interviews, “10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone’s Putin Interviews”, and sub-headlined: “From denying any involvement with U.S. election hacking to Putin’s love of Judo and Stalin, our takeaways from these truly baffling conversations”. Wenner’s reporter opened:

What’s the Russian equivalent of Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, it’s definitely red – and Oliver Stone has eagerly drunk it down. The trailers for The Putin Interviews, Showtime’s four-part series documenting a series of conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stone, would have you believe that you’re going to hear some pretty hard-hitting stuff as the autocrat and the filmmaker face off, Frost-Nixon style. What we got instead was a series of softballs lobbed lovingly in the direction of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world. Except for a few moments, Stone seems serenely unconcerned with anything beyond flattering his subject – and engaging in some supremely one-sided exchanges about history and policy along the way.

The term “red” in this context refers, of course, to communism, and alleges that Russia is still a communist country. To allow that type of smear to appear in any ‘news’ vehicle, is to expose itself as being actually a propaganda-vehicle, unless the allegation is backed up by solid documentation, which Wenner’s magazine didn’t do — Wenner’s magazine presented no documentation at all, for the inflammatory allegation. The magazine’s presumption was that their readers will simply believe what Wenner’s operation delivers, to be ipso-facto ‘true’. But any such reader would be welcoming his own deception by Wenner’s propaganda-operation. Evidently, successful magazines can insult their own subscribers’ intelligence, so long as it’s done in ‘the right way’ — the subscribers won’t despise the publisher for trying to deceive them about such important matters as what countries to invade, or whether to invade, or why to invade. The U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) can attract cannon-fodder for its operations, by means of such ‘news’ media to produce dupes for that MIC.

So, the American system had offered to its public a choice between two neoconservatives, one of whom hid his neoconservatism and won the election but still isn’t sufficiently neoconservative to suit the neoconservatives (such as Wenner).

What, then, about the substance of Putin’s allegation here, that the U.S. government meddles in other nations’ democratic processes?

Furthermore, on 28 June 2009, shortly after Obama became President, a coup by Honduras’s twenty-four richest families overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who had been trying to institute land reform so that serfdom could become replaced there by a real democracy, but all governments except the U.S. refused to recognize the coup-regime, until first Hillary Clinton and then her boss Barack Obama recognized it and financed it with U.S. taxpayer money so that the international pressure to restore the democratically elected President failed and the junta-regime became stabilized. The U.S. government supported the aristocratic families, and helped them rig an ‘election’ amongst only contenders whom that oligarchy and the U.S. oligarchy supported. Much manipulation of the Honduran ‘news’ media and deceit against the Honduran public were perpetrated by both the U.S. aristocracy and the Honduran aristocracy in order to silence of else kill anyone who would challenge it. Here’s the excellent 3-minute video summary of that; and here’s my article documenting it with 72 links to the sources on that matter.

So: those are three examples of extremely severe “meddling” — Syria, Ukraine, and Honduras — all three of which occurred during Obama’s Presidency (and so we’re not talking here about Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973 or Iraq in 2003 or anything other than the most recent U.S. President).Each and every one of them is vastly more heinous than anything that Putin and Russia did, but Russia isn’t imposing sanctions upon the U.S. Even if all of the U.S. regime’s propaganda against Russia were true, the U.S. regime does vastly more damage to democracy, and to national sovereignty, around the world, than Russia does.

On 14 June 2017, at 2:08 in the afternoon, the U.S. Senate passed, by a vote of 97 to 2 (only Rand Paul and Mike Lee voted against it) an intensification of U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that President Obama had first instituted when Russia accepted the petition supported by more than 96% of Crimeans, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia, from which the Soviet dictator Khrushchev had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 without even consulting the residents there at all. Obama’s brutal coup overthrowing the Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted is what had sparked Crimeans to seek to become, yet again — as they had been for hundreds of years until 1954 — Russians. For this ‘conquest of land’ as Obama called it, Russia was slapped with sanctions by Obama, and even now increasingly by the U.S. Congress. One of the four co-sponsors of that bill was the ‘progressive’ Democrat, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown. Apparently, corruption (or else one would need to call it simply “evil”) is quite bi-partisan. And, given that the vote to increase sanctions was 97 to 2, that corruption (or evil) is almost universal in the U.S. Senate.

While we may think that we are voting for a particular brand of politics be it left- or right-leaning, in fact, our votes merely end up electing a figurehead who represents the ruling elites.

Zartan

Three or Four … Come on, the US has Thousands of Examples!

JESUS CHRIST is this planet of the Apes? Have You all lost your minds? USA is GOD of Manipulation, Abuse, War, Death and Destruction!

Not even SATAN can match good old USA!

COME on, people … GIVE ME A “USA, USA, USA!”

andrew1212

CIA was very active in Italy, France and Japan elections after WWII.

————

The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and the priests of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican. Suitcases filled with cash changed hands in the four-star Hassler Hotel. “We would have liked to have done this in a more sophisticated manner,” [F. Mark] Wyatt said. “Passing black bags to affect political election is not really a terribly attractive thing.” But it worked: Italy’s Christian Democrats won by a comfortable margin and formed a government that excluded communists. A long romance between the party and the agency began. The CIA’s practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy–and in many other nations–for the next twenty-five years.”

This is Eric Zuesse, and I just want to thank you for that posting, because every letter of it is exactly as in the book, you were meticulous, and I really should have mentioned that information, which is so superbly relevant and crashes all the garbage we hear now about Russia on this matter. The examples you cited are spot-on. The page numbers you cite are for the 2008 reprint, but in the first edition, it’s pages 27 and 116-121. A very important book. I shall use those examples in the future. If you would like to be hat-tipped on them, how would I refer to you?

andrew1212

No Hat Tip necessary–always enjoy the writers here at Washington’s Blog and find the work to be extremely relevant and important. And, yes, you are correct–my copy of LEGACY OF ASHES is a soft-cover (which came out in 2008). Rarely does great research come in such readable form–every chapter seems to have an eye-popping quote or two, often straight from the lips of a CIA officer or Director. Even the title of the book has deep meaning–coming from a transcript of one of President Eisenhower’s last National Security Council meetings in which he told Allen Dulles “I will hand my successor a Legacy of Ashes.”

For what it’s worth: I found Chapter 5 of Tim Weiner’s BLANK CHECK: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) to have some great information on the National Security Council, the National Security Act of 1947, and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 as well.

andrew1212

I’m pretty certain I’ve also seen an article which directly connects US installing mafia figures into Italy’s political structure in the post-WWII period. I can’t remember where I read the article–but it made a strong case that those types of mafia figures remain involved with Italy’s politics to this day.

Rubymwolfe

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